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Ninety-five years since World War One ended for my great-uncle

An addition to this otherwise repeat tribute, the above photograph was taken in about 1900 when my paternal grandmother was an infant. It’s now been over ninety-five years since her brother, Tom, (here with his foot up on a stool in the McIntyre Photo Studio in Perth) died on the World War One battlefields of France, roughly five weeks before the final assault on Vimy. By the time of his death, Grandma was acting as home-maker to her widowed father, her older sister Bea having pursued a secretarial career away from home.

Perth Courier accounts brought the war close to home.

My father, born ten years and one month after Thomas’ death, and who died in 2002, was given the first name of his late uncle. As my genealogy project continues it is clear that there were many Thomas Butlers, before and after the young fellow from Harper, west of Perth.

Any memories of Grandma talking about him are filtered through the eyes of the child that I was when these stories were told – less interested than I am nowadays. How I would love to hear them again. I can only imagine he went off to war because. at the very least, it was the thing to do at the time.

This is how Tom’s death was reported, with a few more details, in the Perth Courier:

The Pte. Herbert Gibson mentioned as being with Pte. Tom appears in this subsequent article with vivid descriptions of the war:

My sister has a formal portrait of Uncle Tom, in his handsome uniform (different from the one in the press clipping), taken in Perth before his deployment, as well as a cloth belt which was sent home completely covered with various regimental pins from across Canada.

The newspaper clippings come from Veterans Affairs Canada, as do these copies of Uncle Tom’s ‘attestation papers’. (Looking at his signature, I can see an amazing resemblance to my grandmother’s penmanship, as well as my Dad’s!)

In the first part of “The Great War”, a film on CBC-TV by Brian McKenna, we learn that “Complexion: Fresh” was racist code used to distinguish caucasian from non-white soldiers, gladly accepted when county-by-county quotas were low, from their ‘fresh-faced’ comrades.

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One thought on “Ninety-five years since World War One ended for my great-uncle”

It’s wonderful, though sad, to have all this information about your Great Uncle. Some schools assign students the name of a veteran to research. It would be great for someone from Harper or Perth to have this material to learn about Thomas Butler.